No matter what life throws at you, it's always nice to know you can escape into the dark. Especially when they're great, even when they're bad ... they're the movies, after all.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

"Kong: Skull Island"

☆½

Every generation gets the big-budget movies it deserves, and Kong: Skull Island is the final proof that this generation is in a lot of trouble.

The Sixties had its widescreen, increasingly bloated and out-of-touch movie musicals. The Seventies combined auteur-influenced with the blockbuster mentality. The Eighties added massive star power (and lots of synthesized music). In the Nineties, the writers ruled with original stories.

And since the dawn of the Third Millennium, what? Well, think of it this way: Since 2000, the charts of the top 20 films of each year have been ruled by sequels and remakes. Hollywood has no interest in telling original stories that will inspire filmmakers and audiences for many years to come; they want to make money, and the best way to do that is to give people something they've already seen.

Kong: Skull Island is a sort of apotheosis of that mentality, a movie that gives us plenty we have already seen, almost nothing we haven't, and then goes even further by reducing it story to the most meager possible outline of a plot. Though I've admittedly become more cynical and curmudgeonly as time wears on, Kong: Skull Island made me feel even more world-weary and exasperated with the state of modern filmmaking. It made me sad.

It also, frankly, made me bored. Now, as every 11th-grade English teacher in America has said at least once, only boring people are boring, and Kong: Skull Island left me thinking that perhaps that is true. Maybe I have become boring in my hope and expectation that a movie will make at least the barest of effort to keep me entertained by showing me something other than computer-generated sets and art-directed creatures. If Kong: Skull Island is less than exhaustingly boring, then I apologize for my infinite boredom as a human being -- but this movie is a crushing bore. It could have been silly, I would have settled for silly. It could have been excessive, I would have settled for excessive. But it's boring, and that's just something I can't settle for.

Kong: Skull Island takes place in 1973, after a short World War II prologue, and the story is this: a satellite has discovered a previously unknown island, perpetually surrounded by a hurricane-force storm, to which a joint scientific-military exploration is sent. Once there, the expedition meets the massive gorilla known as Kong, and finds out that the island is filled with all sorts of other gigantic creatures. Then they rescue the guy from the World War II prologue, who has been living on the island for 26 years. Then they go home.

Nothing else of consequence happens in the movie. Not one of the characters is interesting enough to become the center of attention, not even Kong himself, who isn't even in half of the movie. Let me say this again so you understand: The makers of Kong: Skull Island did not think enough of their title character to give him the starring role in the film. He has a great introduction, in which he is angry that the U.S. military has invaded his island and that they've started dropping bombs all over it. For about 15 or 20 minutes, he takes down all of their helicopters. It is a good, well-crafted sequence, but it means nothing to the film.

There are some minor discussions of whether maybe Kong was right to be mad about people coming in and tearing up his home, but those scenes don't go anywhere. Some of the people who go the island are scientists, but they don't seem at all interested in what they find. The military people like Samuel L. Jackson's character just want to shoot everything. There's also a guy played by Tom Hiddleston whose function I didn't quite understand, and and a photographer played by Brie Larson who rarely snaps the shutter while taking photos and hasn't brought along any other lenses, or even much film. There are some other military people who get eaten and attacked and eviscerated. And there's John C. Reilly as that World War II veteran who is slightly crazy.

For long periods of Kong: Skull Island I thought about things I shouldn't have been thinking about, like whether Brie Larson will regret following up her Oscar-winning performance in Room with this or if the paycheck more than justified it, and I thought about all of the people sitting in front of computers around the world who made these creatures come to life, and I thought about the meetings at Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment where they talked about franchises and global marketing stunts.

At no time does Kong: Skull Island impart the sense that a group of storytellers sat down and thought, "Wow, we could really sink our teeth into rethinking the whole King Kong thing -- we could make this an exciting, relevant thriller, because this story needs to be retold." Mostly, it imparts the sense that Kong: Skull Island will soon be followed by Kong: New York and Kong: Escape. At that point, the lean and mean original movie will have been carved into three two-hour features, at which point Kong will meet Godzilla, another Warner Bros. monster. That's when the destruction will be so big and massive that only Batman or Superman or the Justice League will be able to save the world in what could be the ultimate franchise extension.

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About Me

I'm lucky enough to make my living within the entertainment industry, and have never lost my passion for movies. Quite apart from my "day job, " I created this job to share my thoughts on movies ... and encourage yours. No matter what life throws at you, it's always nice to know you can escape into the movies. Especially when they're great, even when they're bad ... they're the movies, after all.